Terrific, competitive game.
Ya the Texans' D is legit, Clowney causing all kinds of problems in the backfield the first half. Dude is a beast. But no INT's.
Lots of yellow laundry in this game, can't tell if it's the refs or what.
The field looked rough, did anyone see players slip-sliding around? I didn't notice except maybe a bit, when a player looked to cut often he just fell down. Saw Woods do this once over the middle.
First WR screen was a bust, but then 2 for TD's (Watkins & Woods) that worked out pretty well. Kudos to McVay for crafting WR screens that actually work. Watkins & Kupp & Woods all had great YAC plays. Austin, not so much, had 1 nice run but otherwise caughed up at least 2 TFL's. Do we have a tell when we're going to Austin? TX always seemed to spy him out. The bomb to Woods was magnificent, Kupp drawing the double-team on the crossing pattern was indefensible. Goff just needed a bit of protection & Woods was gone.
Our D is legit too. Ya we gave up some passes but nothing compared to previous D's where we always somehow turned back-up QB's & RB's into pro-bowlers. Ya we gave up some runs, but stuffed quite a few as well. Hopkins was causing problems, as was Fuller (tho the hit on him I saw some helm-to-helm, 22 was not leading w/ the helm but their heads bumped a bit. Mainly hit him in the chest, probably knocked the wind out of him). This does NOT bode well when we face DIGGS. Who's going to cover DIGGS? If the MN game is close late, I do NOT like our chances, tho the game in "big D" is telling of our team's character & will to compete to the last whistle.
Thankfully, we have a beastly front that should rattle Keenum pretty well -- hoping we get to see another un-intentional spike
AD99 was beasting, saw at least one TFL and lots of QB pressure & hits. In the 2nd half, the D looked much more aggressive, & tended to bunch up in the middle swatting down several passes. This D looks to be much faster on a faster field in MN. The DB's aren't doing too shabby either, nice INT's by Barron and Countess to seal the win. Not sure what happened on the AO INT pick-6 that got called back, did we get a PI flag?? AO was no where near the WR, the flag seemed downfield. I've seen a few too many illegal blocking flags by our DB's / LB's where we are basically blocking / tackling a WR or a TE before the ball arrives. We need to get that cleaned up.
Gurley had some nice runs, and his screen pass was great, caught TX flat-footed. Otherwise, Gurley saw some tough sledding. TX either gave up on tackling Dunbar or Dunbar is just that shifty, I dunno. He saw some good lanes, and ran some nice coffin-nailing runs up the middle. He went down on his last run after he got the 1st down, smart kid.
OL had problems with Clowney et al, several plays where Jared had to throw it away & once had an intentional grounding. He got some check-downs off at the last possible second, not bad, but usually didn't get very far. I was half-expecting Saffold to get flagged on Gurley's long screen play, he seemed to block in the back but on second look, it was clean enough. Kudos to our OL today, decent job vs. a stout TX front.
